Law Commons^™

Anticompetitive Patent Settlements And The Supreme Court's Actavis Decision, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

In FTC v. Actavis the Supreme Court held that settlement of a patent infringement suit in which the patentee of a branded pharmaceutical drug pays a generic infringer to stay out of the market may be illegal under the antitrust laws. Justice Breyer's majority opinion was surprisingly broad, in two critical senses. First, he spoke with a generality that reached far beyond the pharmaceutical generic drug disputes that have provoked numerous pay-for-delay settlements.

Second was the aggressive approach that the Court chose. The obvious alternatives were the rule that prevailed in most Circuits, that any settlement is immune from antitrust …

Reverse Payments, Perverse Incentives, Murat C. Mungan

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Agenda: Arizona V. California At 50: The Legacy And Future Of Governance, Reserved Rights, And Water Transfers, University Of Colorado Boulder. Getches-Wilkinson Center For Natural Resources, Energy, And The Environment

Arizona v. California at 50: The Legacy and Future of Governance, Reserved Rights, and Water Transfers (Martz Summer Conference, August 15-16)

The Colorado River is an economic, environmental and cultural lifeline of the southwestern United States, and the allocation of its scarce waters are a source of ongoing controversy. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Arizona v. California. While the case was an important landmark in the still-evolving relationship between these two Lower Basin states, it remains most relevant today by the way in which it clarified federal rights and responsibilities. This is especially true in the areas of federal (including tribal) reserved rights, the role of the Interior Secretary in Lower Basin water …

Late-Night Law Firms, Scott Hershovitz

Reviews

But it turns out that those late-night lawyers may not deserve the scorn that they get. In Sunlight and Settlement Mills, Nora Freeman Engstrom argues that firms like the ones that advertise late at night have developed practice models that achieve many of the aims that reformers have for no-fault accident compensation schemes. They deliver compensation cheaply and quickly, because they settle almost every claim and nearly never go to court. They resolve claims predictably and consistently, on account of cozy relationships with insurance adjusters that lead to a shared sense as to what different sorts of claims are …

Taxing Anxiety, Morgan Holcomb

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I argue for a statutory change to the disparity in the taxation of damages. I submit that nearly all damages, including damages received on account of physical injury, ought to be taxable, and that juries must be apprised of tax consequences so that they can make proper adjustments to take account of these tax consequences. I will refer to this as the full inclusion proposal with jury awareness - for ease, the full inclusion proposal.

My proposed change is the more sound solution for several reasons. Full inclusion creates certainty and avoids wasteful tax gamesmanship. Furthermore, assuming …

Check Please: Using Legal Liability To Inform Food Safety Regulation, Alexia Brunet Marks

Publications

Food safety is a hotly debated issue. While food nourishes, sustains, and enriches our lives, it can also kill us. At any given meal, our menu comes from a dozen different sources. Without proper incentives to encourage food safety, microbial pathogens can, and do enter the food source--so much so that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), each year roughly one in six Americans (or forty-eight million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases. What is the optimal way to prevent unsafe foods from entering the marketplace?

Safety in the food …

Merger Settlement And Enforcement Policy For Optimal Deterrence And Maximum Welfare, Steven C. Salop

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Merger enforcement today relies on settlements more than litigation to resolve anti-competitive concerns. The impact of settlement policy on welfare and the proper goals of settlement policy are highly controversial. Some argue that gun-shy agencies settle for too little while others argue that agencies use their power to delay to extract over-reaching settlement terms, even when mergers are not welfare-reducing. This article uses decision theory to throw light on this controversy. The goal of this article is to formulate and analyze agency merger enforcement and settlement commitment policies in the face of imperfect information, litigation costs, and delay risks by …

Judges! Stop Deferring To Class-Action Lawyers, Brian Wolfman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The idea for this article came from the author's representation of a national non-profit consumer rights organization in a federal appeal challenging a district court’s approval of a class-action settlement. The organization's appellate briefs argued that the district court committed a reversible legal error when it deferred to the class-action lawyers’ recommendation to approve the settlement because, in those lawyers’ views, the settlement was "fair, reasonable, and adequate" (which is the standard for class-action settlement approval under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(e)). The district court also deferred to the lawyers' reputations as talented and honest lawyers.

In this article, …